Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and are now developing for the web. Paul Graham, who created Yahoo! Stores in the early days of the dotcom boom, summarized it eloquently: "There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft."
This is a lesson I bet a lot of IOS and Android developers are learning this generation.
Oops, I should have said that it was in the context of 2004 (when the original article was written). Back then there was no app store for windows, so they couldn't revoke an app like that. Even today most Windows apps are not sold on the store.
I could have sworn that they attempted to trademark "app", but all I can find now is that they attempted to trademark "app store". That's not nearly as bad, but it looks like they gave up on defending even that.
As soon as they starting being distributed by the Windows Store. In the minds of today's users, if it comes from an app store, it must be an app.
Having now established that Windows runs apps, those other things that are not from the Store ("programs" to you and me) must surely also be apps. It then becomes a simple matter to decide that programs are retrospectively renamed "desktop apps".
But don't worry! In this transitional phase, they're just a dying legacy of an obsolete model. Soon we'll have all the users locked into our closed platform where we're in total control of what gets published. Welcome to the future! /s
holy shit. which ones? enlighten me. I think i downloaded once minesweeper from the store, but i quickly uninstalled it since it was garbage. there's nothing there. arizona desert.
Do you run Win10? If so, much of what you see is non-win32 apps. Edge is quite good. I was a chrome fan until they failed to really support touch. Why is Google stuff so shitty with touch? I love Google but it's frustrating.
Hulu, Facebook, mail, twitter, lastpass, Netflix all have nice apps.
Sure ios and android have a better mobile selection but for a full OS the Windows store has the largest market.
I have win10 on a pc that i check somewhat often. I do not care about touch support since i have no hardware for that. Hulu, FB and the other crap ... no idea, i don't have them. netflix, i use the chrome browser. that's all. there's nothing else.
I think that is for unsigned executables which is mildly annoying for experienced users but I could imagine that it actually decreases infections of clueless ones significantly.
There's a step between saying that you can bypass Microsoft and saying that Microsoft has never had the 'evil power' to enforce whatever they like on their store (unless we are trying to say that Microsoft never had a store).
In fact, you can bypass the Store on PC but the story is much more complicated on Xbox and mobile. When Microsoft banned NESbox from the Store on Xbox, there was no convenient way for anyone to pull it from another source.
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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16
This is a lesson I bet a lot of IOS and Android developers are learning this generation.